Not everyone may want a low-car street on their block, but neighbors who agree on creating a pedestrian-priority street should be able to request one.

A few years ago, NYC DOT tested out a new traffic calming concept: the neighborhood slow zone. The idea was to basically add a bunch of speed humps and low-cost traffic calming to improve safety neighborhood by neighborhood.

After the first slow zone came to the Claremont section of the Bronx in 2011, DOT opened up the process and made it an opt-in affair. Civic groups could apply to DOT for slow zones, as long as the streets met the agency’s criteria. (Mostly, clusters of contiguous residential streets were eligible.) More than 100 groups across the city responded.

The slow zone program was a standing offer to neighborhood groups from DOT: Here’s a way to make your streets safer — tell us that you want it and we’ll make it happen. The same basic structure could be used to expand DOT’s “shared space” initiative.

The recently-installed shared space on Broadway between 24th and 25th streets is a new type of pedestrian-priority street for DOT. People on foot can use the whole width of the street — there’s no such thing as jaywalking on this block. Cars have access, but it’s not a through street and drivers are supposed to stay below 5 mph.

The city plans to make a block of 43rd Street near Grand Central Terminal its next “shared street,” and is conducting a shared space pilot on Mott Street in Chinatown for the first three Friday evenings of this month. Past that, however, there aren’t any plans to bring the treatment elsewhere.

That’s too bad, because the shared space concept could be applied in residential contexts too. In a city where summer play streets are a vanishing tradition, “shared space” blocks could give kids permanent places to play. Many New Yorkers would welcome a low-car, pedestrian-priority zone on their block. Most residents don’t own cars, after all.

On a typical residential block, this would require eliminating free on-street parking, and DOT is usually skittish about parking removal. But what if the residents of that block agreed the car storage is less important than having access to the whole street as a public space?

This is where the slow zone model of opting for change comes in. It would take some work to figure out the mechanics, which would be more localized than the neighborhood-scale slow zone process, but the basic idea is the same. A critical mass of residents on a block want it to become a shared space, DOT checks to see if the block meets its technical criteria, and if everything is in order, the share space can proceed.

If you and your neighbors want to live on a block where people take precedence over cars, there should be a way to make that happen.

DOT doesn’t want people to dislike them, so as long as people are attached to their cars shared streets will remain rare. However, if shared streets are made due to residents’ requests, DOT can blame them for the street improvement when a few members of the communities get upset.

Residents of the Bronx’s Norwood section have long dealt with missing sidewalks and crosswalks on the street encircling Williamsbridge Oval Park, the neighborhood’s central green space. After getting stonewalled by DOT’s Bronx Borough Office, neighborhood leaders are now hoping a Slow Zone application will get DOT to take action. Since 2009, advocates have been asking for basic […]

The deadline to apply to NYC DOT for a neighborhood slow zone is tomorrow, and groups from many different corners of New York are making their case for bringing a 20 mph speed limit and traffic calming measures to their neighborhoods. “We are hearing from people applying for zones all over the city,” said Lindsey […]

Ask a Greenpoint resident to name the neighborhood’s most dangerous street, and they’ll likely point to McGuinness Boulevard, an infamous speedway that splits the neighborhood in half. Today, it became the city’s third “arterial slow zone” to receive a 25 mph speed limit, retimed traffic signals to discourage speeding, and focused enforcement. The arterial slow […]

Launched in 2011, the DOT Neighborhood Slow Zone program is intended to keep drivers from exceeding 20 mph in residential areas. Strengthening and expanding the program should be a key aspect of Vision Zero, but instead, DOT has watered down some Slow Zone features, apparently in response to motorist complaints about curbside parking. This week […]

Earlier this month, Brooklyn Community Board 3 voted against a 20 mph Slow Zone in Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. In a recent interview, CB 3 Chair Tremaine Wright told Streetsblog that the board voted against it in part because dangerous driving is not an issue in the neighborhood, and Slow Zone supporters did not demonstrate that […]